Letter from the Director, Summer 2016
Dear Friends,
As we enter into our summer break, it’s a good time to look back at the past year and toward the coming one. 2015-2016 was a busy year for the Museum Studies Program. Our MSP15 cohort, an exciting group of students from ten different departments and graduate program, has headed off —some to pursue summer practicums, some to undertake their doctoral research, and one to a permanent museum archivist job at the Henry Ford! This year’s student capstone projects brought teams of students together to work on projects with U-M Hospital Gifts of Art Program, Pewabic Pottery, the Motown Museum, and the U-M Detroit Center.
We hosted a robust series of events, with our fall lecture series on “Global Heritage at Risk,” ten Brown Bag lectures, a winter semester workshop on “New Voices and Detroit Museums” featuring DIA director Salvador Salort-Pons, Michigan Science Center director Dr. Tonya Matthews, and three Detroit Revitalization Fellows. In addition, the Fall was full of events around the exhibition that MSP Associate Director’s Brad Taylor curated with Tyree Guyton at Gallery DAAS, and our winter semester visiting scholar Randi Korn delivered a public lecture and workshop on intentionality in museum practice.
Brad and I attended the AAM meetings in Washington, DC last month, and were inspired by the many presentations we saw on expanding diversity in museums—both in who visits museums and who works within them. There seems to be a new dynamism in the museum world on this important topic, and we are working to capture it in our upcoming fall programming. We are also looking forward to celebrating the 15th year of the Museum Studies Program this year, and to taking the opportunity to look backwards at our accomplishments and look forward to the future of Museum Studies pedagogy.
Meanwhile, I hope you all have a wonderful summer and we look forward to seeing you in the fall.
Warm regards
Carla
